[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

Thu Mar 20 21:44:37 UTC 2008

On 20/03/2008, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com> wrote:

>  In the binary choice between servers running and advertisements, I
>  would choose the ads. However, the world is rarely one of binary
>  choices. If we get into a situation where the servers are down, or are
>  going down inevitably, I would call that an "emergency" situation, and
>  people are prone to making bad decisions in an emergency. We could put
>  out a distress signal and wait to be bailed out by some other entity
>  (be it the community donors, large corporate donors, or some other
>  benefactor), but such a bail-out would happen on their terms, not
>  ours. Doing something proactive like advertising (which again, isn't
>  the only proactive option we might potentially have) is, at the very
>  least, done on our terms under our control. It's a concession that we
>  would have to make in order to stay out of somebody else's pocket.

I might note here that we used to joke that "downtime is our most
profitable product" - whenever the servers were melting and people got
the "out of order" sign, that would immediately generate donations.

You can tell it was only joking by the fact that the devs have since
built a network quite up to the task of serving the ridiculous number
of hits we do and it's really quite reliable now :-)

I went to the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum) today. (I did bring my
camera and get lots of nice photos. V&A allows non-flash photography
of most exhibitions.) They had a box at the door with "Suggested
donation £3" with the "£3" really big. I put in £5. It was clearly
voluntary, but also made it clear it would have been somewhat dickish
not to put a few quid in if you could spare it. They have the
occasional sponsored exhibition (e.g. "The Samsung Gallery of Korean
Art").

I dunno - articles with "Was this article useful to you? Suggested
donation: 25c" or something.

- d.